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In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. [1] The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek gráphō ('write'), and the suffix -eme by analogy with phoneme and other emic units. The study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is abstract and similar to the notion in computing of a ...
Kinds of emic units are generally denoted by terms with the suffix -eme, such as phoneme, grapheme, and morpheme. The term "emic unit" is defined by Nöth (1995) to mean "an invariant form obtained from the reduction of a class of variant forms to a limited number of abstract units". [2] The variant forms are called etic units (from phonetic).
A phonogram is a grapheme i.e. one or more written characters which represent a phoneme (speech sound), [1] rather than a bigger linguistic unit such as morphemes or words. [2] For example, "igh" is an English-language phonogram that represents the / aɪ / sound in "high".
In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be represented by its corresponding grapheme. So the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation, and conversely, a ...
By analogy with the phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme, such as morpheme and grapheme. These are sometimes called emic units . The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike , who also generalized the concepts of emic and etic description (from phonemic and phonetic ...
A phoneme may be represented only by some combination or string of graphemes, the same phoneme may be represented by more than one distinct grapheme, the same grapheme may stand for more than one phoneme, or some combination of all of the above. Segmental scripts may be further divided according to the types of phonemes they typically record:
grapheme Latin phoneme English approximation c , k [k] Always hard as k in sky, never soft as in cellar, cello, or social. k is a letter coming from Greek, but seldom used and generally replaced by c. ch [kʰ] As ch in chemistry, and aspirated; never as in challenge or change and also never as in Bach or chutzpah.
A zero-morpheme is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by auditory phoneme. A word with a zero-morpheme is analyzed as having the morpheme for grammatical purposes, but the morpheme is not realized in speech. They are often represented by /∅/ within glosses. [7] Generally, such morphemes have no visible ...